Ask HN: How did you get people to visit your personal blog?
Not really been having a lot of success with getting people to visit my blog.
Curious to hear some of the ways that people here have got others to visit their blog.
Curious to hear some of the ways that people here have got others to visit their blog.
I just create and publish. It doesn't matter what format, audio, video, coding, or writing, I just publish and share freely. If people share it widely of their own volition, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine too.
I create for the sake of creating. I've gotten my value out of it. I'm not going to try to go out of my way to push it on people. I'm not so arrogant to think that whatever I create is a more valuable use of anyone's time than anything else they could be doing instead.
Also, pushing my work on people is a form of advertising, and I'm morally opposed to advertising. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to block ads and then make ads.
The only thing I do, is I make it easy for people to follow if they have chosen to do so of their own volition. RSS feeds. Plain old HTML. No tracking or analytics. Creative Commons Licenses. It's there if you want it. If people ask, then I answer. But I never impose before someone has opted in.
Taking attention away from those people towards myself would actually be a detriment to spreading good knowledge.
Hacker News is great for any kind of tech related post, and any similar-ish type content.
LinkedIn if you have a large following is a great place to post as well, make sure to add the relevant hashtags to your post's topics so that others who paruse those interests might see them.
Subreddits relevant to the post content are always a good way to go, and there really is a subreddit for anything, so that can be a driver of traffic.
Also, make sure once you have people on a given post to _ask them to subscribe_ you need to have a call to action at the end of your post in order to remind people that you exist, that your writing is interesting, and that they might want to see more. It feels a little weird, but a single sentence at the end can help people take that leap.
That said, its a giant crapshoot. I posted a blog post[1] around the same time that you did for this AskHN post, and sometimes you get engagement, and sometimes you dont. This time I wasnt so lucky, but if you're consistent, I'd say about half the time you get decent enough engagement.
I sometimes wonder if we're overestimating the value because adding one bumps your subscribers by 10x, but what that means is that instead of 10 subscribers you get 100.
1) Posting here when it's relevant. Success rate so far: 0%, but I've only tried a couple of times.
2) Answering questions on Quora and including a link to my blog. # of visitors so far: 0, but I've only answered a couple of questions.
3) Answering questions on the relevant Subreddit: # of visitors so far: 0, despite having tried a bunch.
4) Starting a companion Substack: don't know, just launched it today!
5) Contacting other bloggers in space: I'm playing the long game here, so I haven't directly asked for backlinks. Feature posts seem to be a dead format, most bloggers in my niche explicitly don't do them.
6) Posting all content to social media: I regularly post to LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, but I've only seen engagement with LinkedIn. I think that's because I have ~1,500 organic connections there and a couple hundred followers.
7) Creating content on other platforms: I dipped my toe into Tiktok, but the brand and the format didn't match. I still want to at least try Youtube, but it's a much bigger time investment, so I imagine it'll be a while before I can do that.
I've only been it at it for about 8 months, so still early days, but as with most other stuff on the internet, attention and followers seem to follow a largely luck-driven power law distribution. So my current strategy is just to try as many possible avenues as I can afford.
My contact info is in my profile, happy to connect to discuss this more if you'd like!
And for anyone curious, my blog is over here: http://www.overthinkingmoney.com Don't mean to shamelessly self-promote, but I figured some people might be interested in the context.
For positive feedback, the best part of the blog is the use of flowcharts, tables, and graphics that organizes the information quite nicely. This is a higher-effort and effective way to communicate technical information, and especially numerical information. The presentation of information in this way also helps your blog stand out from similar websites about the same subject.
However, the biggest weakness I can see (as a non-expert reader) is that it's hard for me to immediately tell whether or not the advice is credible, which is especially important because your blog is about money and personal finance. It is an unfortunate reality that there are quite a few financial blogs that give low-quality or even malicious advice. Though a reader could give the blog a chance and evaluate the advice logically and from first principles, that takes effort—it would be helpful for the reader and the blog to have more signals that the advice is trustworthy.
A good way to achieve trustworthiness would be to include a prominent About page (I couldn't immediately find one, outside of the brief introduction on the right-hand sidebar and a couple sentences on the Contact page). If comfortable, after weighing the pros and cons, the inclusion of your full name on the blog itself would also elevate the blog from a semi-anonymous blog to a personal blog tied to your identity. The advice would then appear more credible to the reader, as the credibility of the blog would have a more direct effect on your personal reputation.
A more detailed biography would also provide a chance for the reader to understand why your blog is trustworthy, and how your personal life experience gives you unique and useful insights into personal finance. For example, you mention your background working in major technology companies in the past on your Hacker News biography. Mentioning this upfront would add credibility to your articles on "Tech Stock Compensation" articles—while you present a bit of your personal background in the article itself, a reader landing on the homepage would find it helpful to learn about your background from that page of the website, as they decide whether or not to continue exploring your website by reading its articles.
To summarize: it's great that you are sharing your knowledge and experience through a personal blog, and this comment itself is another example of the insights you have to share. However, potential readers who do not already know you would benefit from having an easier way to understand why they should trust your perspective and point of view, especially as the blog deals concerns personal finance—with this subject, the consequences of taking bad advice can be severe. You can more easily communicate why the your advice is trustworthy by writing more about your personal background in an easier-to-find way on the website.
Writing first for your own site, and then either copying elsewere or linking from elsewhere at least preserves the original writeup.
On many platforms there is a preference for very short answers (too long didn't read). So copying a very short version and linking to the full version seems like a good direction. It's not perfect because contributing answers are then locked on each platform. - But we can always link back to a few worthwhile, and summarize them on our own page.
After that, traffic or not is mostly out of our control.
Adding one thought that may be relevant: I don't generally recommend people care deeply about how many other people read their blog. I know, you can't always choose what you care about... But I found my life was happier when I stopped thinking about my blog as something I'm writing for other people and started thinking about it as something I'm writing because I'm going to need to search for this information later when I inevitably forget how I did something. The long tail of blog posts in my blog are myself re-searching it to remember how I configured some thisorthat three years ago. For that reason alone, the blog (in its old notion of 'web log,' i.e. "a log of things you have done, searchable from the web") is worth keeping, and if it's useful to others too, bonus.
What's your content? Is it something you want to read? Most important, if you can't stand to read it, don't expect others to.
Is it about some subject others are interested in? Do they discuss it elsewhere? If so you should watch that forum and take any opportunity to share links to your posts when they're relevant. Not spamming, just "I have a post about $X" when that's actually being discussed. maybe a include a quote. "$X is best used in combination with $Y, imo, and I go into more detail here at link"
Even if your content isn't that focused you might find legitimate opportunities to share a link. For example, I've got a "daily news links" site:
It's not specific enough to be mentioned in many conversations but I manage sometimes.
Regardless, be prepared for the fact that "success" is relative; there's a lot of people out there with no desire to know about anything that wasn't stuffed into their terminal by their familiar sources.
Just having your urls to reference in public yourself is worth some effort. The net is so ephemeral, being able to say "this existed then and i took some note of it" is something.
0. Make sure your blog is properly indexed on Google/Bing/Duck etc. You can submit your blog URL manually. 1. Post on social platforms such as Facebook, HN, Twitter, Messengers etc. 2. Throw in a subscribe button on your website that lets your audience subscribe to your blog. I think this is where I've gotten the most value from. If you have a subscription list, you can export it to other platforms later on. 3. There are some discussions here on HN where they ask you to post your personal blog so others can follow them. Make sure to participate in such discussions.
Unless your blog posts go viral, acquiring users is a relatively slow process.
It's better to focus on helping others vs self advertising.
I think in general, marketing, by proxy, revenue generation is one of those game theory, if it becomes the optimal strategy, everyone will adopt it and it'll be level again type things.
Because I was tired to answer always the same questions by copy and paste, I started to post them online.
As of today, the blog has more than 10000 articles and has between 50k and 10k users a week depending on Google algo.
Found the audience that you want to be part of be useful, add post where they are.
You don't need all your content to be SEO, but you should have a few good SEO articles that do well with search.
If you write original content that is not highly searched for, you're likely not to get too many visitors because bottom-feeding leeches like Google have ruined the web and turned it into an SEO-farm nightmare so that they could line their pockets while greasing the wheels of needless consumerism.
I also use it as a spot to stash the side decks from presentations I have given (for example to the local linux user's group).
I have friends who are large Youtubers/social media people, and others in that circle very upset when they only hit 10-20k views on their videos. Ten to twenty thousand. That's a failure to them. The bigger ones feel 400k is a failure for them.
Using externalised metrics to measure success is a road to disaster. Just have fun, and measure success on writing and posting something you're proud of. People will eventually find it, but that should never be the goal.
The easiest way to get some 'early readers' is to share it with friends and family. The question is, however, do you WANT your friends and family to read it?
Get popular blogs to allow you to write as a guest. They'll own that content, but usually they will let you link back to your own homepage.
I don't maintain my blog anymore, but when I did, those things worked.
On my personal blog, I don't. If someone finds it, cool.
On my professional blog, I'll post updates on LinkedIn and try to make the content search engine friendly for easier discoverability.
Many of the folks with lots of subscribers to their blog use social media and are on some kind of a talk circuit.
1. Sharing a direct link to a specific, interesting news headline on HackerNews - 0
2. Buying ads on Reddit. Two experiments - specific, clickbaity headline, and generic newsletter pitch. The specific one performed better, but in general, the whole experiment was a bust. 0.5% click-through rate, 1% conversion rate. ~14$ to acquire a single subscriber. Ain't nobody got money for that.
3. The best performance I got was out of a ProductHunt launch. 2/3 of my subscribers came from PH. And the most surprising bit was the long tail - more than two weeks after the launch, I'm still seeing subscribers come in from PH.
Shameless plug: https://tldrweekly.com
1/ writing about niche topics people google search
2/ write deep long form content and post on link directories like HN, reddit, etc.